The Margins of History

A manuscript scholar at Heidelberg University can prove the identity of the “Mona Lisa,” Reuters announced yesterday. The sitter was Lisa Gherardini, the wife of the Florentine merchant Francesco del Giocondo. While this is hardly breaking news—the Leonardo da Vinci biographer Giorgio Vasari made the same claim in the mid-sixteenth century—the fact is now almost indisputable, thanks to a note scribbled by a Florentine official in 1503 in the margins of a collection of letters by Cicero. We congratulate Ms. Gherardini on this definitive news.—Andrea K. Scott

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